This blog follows the history of psychiatry

“The game of death”

This evening, France 2, a French public national television channel, will broadcast a documentary inspired by the Milgram experiments in the 1960s. “Le jeu de la mort”, signed by Christophe Nick, transposed to the television the experiment at Yale University by Stanley Milgram in the 1960s to probe the mechanisms of the submission of the Nazi Germans. For this experiment, 80 volunteers who had never attended a game show were recruited. They were told that they participate at a new entertainment-show called “Xtreme Zone”. The goal: to submit a candidate – in fact a comedian – to a series of questions. The punishment? An electric shock ranging from 80 to … 460 volts. With each wrong answer, the public also recruited, cries “punishment”. . 80% of questioners go to the end of the game as it becomes a torture session. Only 16 candidates have abandoned the game resisting the authority of television. The documentary has raised a major debate in France on reality shows and the power of television.